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Rimsky Lives!
THE TARTARS ARE COMING! Circle the wagons and sing hymns! That's more or less the plot of The Invisible City of Kitezh. No, not Kitsch. It's an operatic masterpiece, long suppressed by the Soviets for its pious Christian fervor, by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov. The real cause for hymn-singing is that it's finally gotten its first accurate recording in a Philips set, along with two other quirky Rimsky operas. These recordings should rescue this composer from a reputation based primarily on that buzzing number, "The Flight of the Bumblebee." Oh yes, he also wrote the repetitive crowd-pleaser Scheherazade, but that hasn't helped at all, really. Rimsky lived one of those lives that seems impossible outside of Czarist Russia. He was a commissioned naval officer and a largely self-taught musician. Born in 1844, the remarkable Rimsky wrote the first Russian symphony in 1867. He formed The Mighty Five, a group of Russian composers who of course had no power whatsoever (the other "mighties" were Borodin, Mussorgsky, Cui and Balakirev). One thing they all had in common was an unmitigated loathing for that fey internationalist Tchaikovsky. So they all did the Slavic thing, slathering their work with Russian folk and liturgical music, drinking absurd amounts of alcohol and each proving all but incapable of sustaining a proper relationship with a woman. Worse, Rimsky was a democrat who had trouble with the czars. The royals much preferred Tchaikovsky, and their political intrigue against Rimsky hastened his fatal heart attack in 1908. But behind the bio lies a wealth of splendid music. You can hear the full range of Rimsky's prodigious gifts in Kitezh, where the composer marries Russian liturgical-style music to folk song. The opera is an allegory about forgiveness, with the splendors of the forest manifesting the grace of Christ. In the last act the heroine forgives the cowardly drunkard who has betrayed her, as the destroyed city of Kitezh turns into heaven. Though the Soviets kept performing the opera, they rewrote it to glorify the "God-free People's State." When the music got politically incorrect they simply left it out. Philips has also released two other Rimsky operas. The Czar's Bride is all blood and thunder, with some great tunes. Kashchey the Immortal is a crazy one-act work. Rimsky taught Igor Stravinsky, and you can now hear just where the "radical" Stravinsky got all his ideas. Rimsky goes wild with strange scales, weird chords, rhythms that rock--and yes, you still get the occasional big tune as well. All of it is orchestrated to a T. Even Sergei Rachmaninov (he of the "big tune" repeated over and over) was influenced by this opera--the musical theme of the magician Kashchey turns up note for note in Second Symphony. Rimsky has long been more a name than a musical presence. I hope these fabulous recordings change that.
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